Robot wants dots! Okay, the star of Robotic Arm, a simple idea puzzle game by Amidos might be missing his torso, head, and legs, but his desires are no less poignant. Each level features lines connected to filled and empty circles, surrounded by yellow dots. The filled circles serve as rotational joints: clicking one will rotate the connecting arms 45 degrees clockwise (save for the one in the center, which is fixed in place). The level is completed when each and every unfilled circle contains a yellow dot. Each level has a minimum number of moves to shoot for, but as there is no penalty for undoing or redoing moves, it's worth experimenting.
Robotic Arm's eerie music and starkly minimalist, almost abstract, aesthetic might turn some people away. You can never find a cartoonishly snarky AI when you need one. No matter though: Robotic Arm offers a cunning test of spatial logic that should appeal to any fan of mechanical manipulation puzzles. Maybe the Robot Apocalypse won't be so bad after all!
4/5 from me.
I enjoyed the game, but I would have appreciated an indication of which node was the root. It was pretty easy to figure out, since it's the one that makes the whole structure glow, but some immediate sign would be nice.
Also, it should be possible to turn anticlockwise as well.
But yeah, the puzzles were just right, and it didn't drag on like some other games I could mention - just a nice little snack before I go to bed!
Cute, but maybe a little too light.
I think it's tough to make challenging puzzles in this game because it has what I'll call an "abelian play mechanic": it doesn't matter what order you click the nodes in, as long as you click the right ones the right number of times. So getting the answer is usually easy, and most of the time you end up solving the puzzle in the minimum number of steps on the first try without having to plan ahead. There's one exception to this rule in the levels where one node can end up on top of another one (because if you want to click the node on the "bottom", you have to do so before that happens), but otherwise the levels don't really feel different from each other.
Not that I have any idea how to fix this without fundamentally changing the game. Ah well.
Game won't load for me. :[ (OS X, Chrome)
Disregard previous...Shockwave crashed on me, so of course it wasn't loading. *sweatdrop*
@Buttons: it's not completely abelian, as sometimes you get rotator nodes atop one another, and can't freely choose which one you're clicking on.
How disappointing, in that I finished all the levels quickly and according to the score, got them all right. I need MORE of this game and MORE challenge!
Far too easy.
Robot Claw ( http://jayisgames.com/archives/2006/03/roboclaw.php ) was better.
It's a good puzzle game, but I don't understand all the effort to relate the game to robots. It has nothing robotic about it. It's just a rotation puzzle game. The robot stuff just makes it seem like the game thinks too highly of itself.
Level 12 can be cheated in only 14 moves – it accepts a solution that doesn't have all hands on dots.
Update